Tech Tip – I learn the hard way that you should let your Kindle go to sleep on its own instead of forcing it to sleep each time you finish reading.

Interview (Starts at 9:09)– David Burleigh, Director of Marketing at Overdrive, describes e-book lending enhancements the company is announcing at the American Library Association’s annual meeting. We spoke by Skype and phone on Wednesday, June 22, 2011, between Cleveland and Cambridge, Mass.

Upcoming – I will be presenting a webinar titled “Formatting Content for E-Readers” on Monday, June 27, 2011 at 2 p.m. EDT, sponsored by the Professional Outdoor Media Association (POMA). It will last a half hour including questions. It’s free, but space is limited. Click here to register. I hope you’ll stop by!

Comments 12

Marie Sotiriou wrote:

Len

You mentioned on the podcast today if anyone has a cool feature that they would like Amazon to implement on the Kindle. I would love to be able to email links to articles that I am reading on my subscribed newspaper, magazine, or blog directly from the device. You would have to have either the 3G or Wi-Fi turned on and be able to store a list of email addresses. Today if I find an article that might interest a friend I have to note the title/author (sometimes I “clip this article” on the Kindle for reference) and remember to google it online to send. It would be pretty cool to have an option to send this right from the device. Amazon probably does not want to incur the 3G charges, but maybe we could just do it thru Wi-Fi.

Len and others,
For 3 years I’ve manually put my Kindles to sleep ANY time I stop reading after I press HOME to close the log files and make sure my last-page read and annotations -are- logged. Then because I put it to sleep after that, no unintentional page turns happen when I pick it up.

That’s crucial. The data is lost if any freeze happens otherwise before you next try to read on it. But I put it to sleep (never turning it off unless I’m gone for a month) always.

I’m one of the few people who haven’t had screen or freeze malfunctions on any of my 4 Kindles. Tech reps on the first level too often say things that make no sense.

But what the official Amazon Customer Svc reps have said in writing on the forums is that you should leave Kindles in Sleep mode and not turn them Off completely, as the latter takes up more battery use and there’s no more draw on the battery when we just put it to sleep.

If Kindle’s memory is confused, it will of course freeze and need a Restart. Luckily, I’ve never had a Kindle refuse to wake up after doing the long-Restart (17 to 21 seconds in my case – and walking away while it goes through the basic re-startup).

Most reports of lost-data come from people who don’t press HOME to close the book and complete log-processes. It’s left in an incomplete state, and if you have kids or animals around, Lord knows what can happen to the Kindle before you can close the book and logs.

Besides what I wrote and is pending moderation Sunday, it occurred to me that because of the new Kindle SO ads situation, there are usually promises made to advertisers for how much exposure an ad gets.

So, maybe time-display is monitored in some way, and NOW if we change the screensaver by putting the Kindle in and out of sleep to get a picture we want — the way we have done with author pics with no ill effect I have ever experience — it messes up something Amazon is doing to meet specs (it might monitor the K’s ad activity) for how much exposure a screensaver ad gets on the Kindle SO’s.

There is no reason I can think of why putting it in and out of sleep should cause a freeze – that would be bad design, unless it is stopping a background activity and confusing the Kindle then.

The problem may lie with restarting and quickly shutting down to get a different sleep screen, as you mentioned. There might be background processes running after startup are getting interrupted. I never sleep my Kindle 3 or turn off the WiFi and the battery life is still weeks long.

Any chance you might send that POMA webinar out to us as a ‘bonus’ podcast? I usually listen to such things on walks.

Len, I’m still observing and investigating the ‘light text’ problem on my Nook Touch. I think it is probably a combination of factors, including the ones I’ve mentioned so far. They all seem software- rather than hardware- related, so I’m hopeful that B&N can deliver an update to address these.

For example, I’m seeing a fairly consistent behavior when tapping the ‘nook’ button twice after turning a page: the last line on the screen (the one temporarily ‘obscured’ by the navigation panel) looks noticeably darker/clearer than the lines above it (I want to say it is ‘as clear as can be’ but that might be a little too sweeping a statement to make at this point). This effect is more apparent at small text sizes (1-3).

Again, it’s suggestive of a software issue that could be addressed in a future update. It’s as if the normal page display is ‘underexposed’, perhaps due to over-optimization for power conservation. If that’s the case, I’d gladly trade a few days of battery life for consistently clearer, darker text.

At any rate, I have some more experiments in mind to tease out more information about this issue when I have some time, and will let you know what I find.

Thanks for the David Burleigh interview, you asked most of the questions I would have had, and I thought he was as forthcoming as he could be. I still have a few questions (will we be able to use K3 web browser to select and download content from the library portal? will we be able to choose format on a case by case basis, rather than some user default?—hope so, some ebooks may have better formatting in ePub, etc.). Call me a pessimist but I don’t expect library borrowing on Kindle before December, which was one reason I was happy to get a Nook Touch now.

Regarding the ‘too many authorizations’ problem with ADE, I’ve read that Adobe automatically increases these over time beyond an initial limit of 5, specifically to reduce support calls as people add new devices and reading apps to their repertoire (and need to authorize ADE, Copia, Overdrive Media Console, etc. on new computers, tablets, smartphones). I’ve been fortunate so far in avoiding the limit, but it looks like this issue is more evidence, as if any were needed, of the increasing proliferation of e-reading, beyond even what Adobe could have anticipated just a couple of years ago.

I believe this is why B&N worked with Adobe on a new form of DRM, to reduce the dependency on ADE to side-load DRM content onto dedicated reading devices that license the Adobe client SDK. Even so, Nook still must be authorized by ‘proxy’ by ADE to allow library borrowing or side-loading in general. Wireless delivery is restricted to content directly from B&N at present, and that does not seem likely to change in the near future.